There’s a spark of brightness in “The Magnificent Seven,” director Antoine Fuqua’s update of the 1960 Western classic, that’s missing in Fuqua films like “The Equalizer” or “Southpaw,” an appealing moral certitude that feels comforting against the deep ambiguity of most real-world problems.

It appears in the establishing scenes, where a gang of hired baddies terrorizes the hardworking, aw-shucks townsfolk of Rose Creek at the behest of black-hat industrialist Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), who wants their town for its mining riches. It’s glimpsed as our grizzled frontier heroes are introduced one-by-one, in the style of “Ocean’s Eleven” or “Hateful Eight,” to combat the sniveling, inconsistently accented Bogue. It even manages to avoid being snuffed out by the bullet-riddled bodies that seem to pile up wherever our heroes go.

Pity, then, that it’s not nearly as bright as the the factory sheen of this plodding, rote film.

Fuqua has no easy task in remaking one of Hollywood’s most iconic Westerns, and the individual pieces are as sturdy as one could hope. Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk’s script is brisk and direct, with natural pacing and enough human drama to make the long, over-the-top action sequences feel earned.

The sprawling cast, including Denzel Washington as sworn officer and gun-for-hire leader Sam Chisolm, saddles up gamely — although no one will mistake Chris Pratt’s good-time frat cowboy Josh Faraday for memorably unique. The remaining five “magnificents,” a sweaty assortment of outlaws, gamblers and aging cons recruited by Chisolm to defend Rose Creek, all look the part. But only Ethan Hawke (a veteran of Fuqua’s “Training Day,” whom Washington won a Best Actor Oscar playing against) feels like a fleshed-out character.

In this image released by Sony Pictures, Chris Pratt, right, and Denzel Washington appear in a scene from "The Magnificent Seven."

With a saturated, gritty aesthetic that’s not afraid to zoom in on the actors’ pores, or make sole female character/plot device Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) look suitably grimy, “The Magnificent Seven” marks its limited ground early on, as it does a brutal, sickly thudding approach to violence. Each bullet fired connects with something (usually someone) in a way that most CGI action extravaganzas could never hope to. There’s more than one scene where a character is stumbling, dazed, through a maze of corpses.

But as neatly as the handsome pieces fit into their slots, a higher sense of structure and meaning never coheres, despite the callbacks to Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” the film on which this and John Sturges’ 1960 “Magnificent” are based. Fuqua’s high-minded, if simplistic, themes of duty, sacrifice and good vs. evil appear throughout, but they feel like polite nods under a tipped hat as opposed to core principals.

For every masculine zinger in the dialogue, there’s a clumsy treatise on capitalism or a surface-level take on race relations and violence. And some characters, like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Jack Horne, waste their larger-than-life potential with comically high-pitched characterizations, shattering whatever dusty, far-eyed spirituality Fuqua may have conjured in the previous scenes.

As things build toward the long, bloody and by-the-numbers (if ably staged) showdown, it’s hard not to mourn for the film this could have been, considering the assemblage of talent. Instead it feels like a not-so-risky paycheck for a bunch of hired guns.